This Sweet And Bitter Earth

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

The men of the North Wales slate quarries lived dangerous, unhealthy and underpaid lives; as a boy Toby Davies joined them. The quarries taught him precious truths about poverty and exploitation, but Toby also learned of love from the two beautiful women in his life - Bron and Nanwen O'Hara. Toby moved south to seek work in the coal mines, but found no easier future. He was there at the notorious Tonypany riots of 1910 and the police occupation of the Rhondda, and would never forget the savagery of the battles fought between the workers and the bosses.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 448

Sample

Six days ago, when the workhouse cart left Wrexham, there had been eight of us, but the Crowther lads had hopped off at Denbigh and the Rhubarb Twins left us in Conway. And so, when we came to Bethesda, there was only me and Ma Bron left. With my legs swinging on the footboard I was watching the stars above the Glyders when she asked:

‘Where you off to, then?’

Bluenose, our workhouse driver, was hunched black against the moon, and his old mare, knowing he was drunk, clip-clopped along the summer road as if she knew the place like the back of her hoof.

‘You deaf, or something?’

‘I’m going to Padarn,’ I replied, wanting to be rid of her.

‘You got people there?’

‘Sort of.’ I shrugged her off.

‘What you mean – sort of? Either you got people, mate, or not.’

‘Got a grandpa, if he’s people.’

‘You’m lucky,’ said she. ‘I only got aunts.’

‘Do they live in Bethesda?’

‘Pesda, they say.’

‘Same place.’

She spoke again but I let her ride, for she was a fancy piece, this one, and she’d got a six inch nose on her since leaving Wrexham workhouse, and my mam always said you shouldn’t let too many into your pantry, which applied to sixteen-year-old Welsh bits. It was a gorgeous April night, I remember, with the moon as big as a Dutch cheese, sitting on the top of the Flights of Penrhyn, and the Ogwen River was strangling the fields with a quicksilver flood.

‘You raised in these parts, Toby Davies?’

Down to christian names now. ‘Sort of,’ I said again, pretty civil.

She fluffed up her bright hair, looking like a great fair dove on the footboard and peered at me, her eyes dark smudges in the pallor of her cheeks. ‘You know,’ said she, ‘you’re a stitched up fella, ain’t you? – down south in Porth they’d open you up with a razor.’

For all her talk, I’ve never seen a woman at sixteen as pretty as this Taff from the south; there were some flighty bits turned up all the years I was in the workhouse, and some of them had babies, but I never did see a girl there to hold a candle to her, with her bright, laughing eyes and tumbling gold hair. She was a warm piece, even for the Rhondda, I heard the Master say; sure as fate someone will turn her into two, and some folks reckoned he did.

There was no sound but the wind and the clopping of the hooves, and Ma Bron sighed like the well of life going dry, took a deep breath and opened the buttons of her bodice; the baby in her arms hammered and sucked.

‘How old are you, Toby Davies?’

‘Sixteen, same as you.’

‘You Welsh speaking?’

‘Aye.’

‘I’m not.’ She smoothed her baby’s face. ‘I was raised down south, but we only talked English – I suppose I’m half and half.’ She smiled at me. ‘Will you be my friend when we get to Pesda?’

‘Ay ay,’ I said, making a note to cut and run for it, for I once had an aunt in the back pews of Pesda’s Jerusalem, and I know what she’d have done to people arriving with black sin babies. We looked at each other, Ma Bron and me, and then at the baby, and she said, raising her face:

‘You like my little Bibbs?’

‘She’s all right.’

‘She’s mine proper, ye know – she ain’t just a foundling.’

‘Who’s her father?’

We glared at each other.

‘You’ve a dirty mind on ye, Toby Davies,’ said she, ‘just like the rest of ’em.’ She fondled her baby’s face. ‘Hasn’t he, Bibbs? He’s a dirty old bugger, ain’t he?’

The cart left Nant Ffrancon Pass behind us; the chimneys of Bethesda began to steeple the moon. The baby slept. Ma Bron and me swayed and juddered together on the footboard; she said:

‘I liked your ma before she died.’

I bowed my head and salt was on my lips.

‘She were helpful to me when my baby came.’

I did not reply.

She said, ‘You only stayed on, really, ’cause your mam was ill, didn’t you?’

I nodded.

‘Best for you to be out and about, now your mam’s gone.’

Aye, best, I thought, when once your mam’s away in the box.

Bron sighed at the moon. ‘Mind, you’re a big boy, ye know – soon you’ll be gettin’ across the women. And your grandad’s going to have fits with his legs up when he sees you in the nose-bag.’ She stared about her at the cottages of Caerberllan. ‘Is this Bethesda?’

‘Coming up now,’ I said.

‘You know these parts?’

I nodded.

‘You heard of Pentir, where my aunts live?’

I didn’t tell her that this was my land in childhood; that this big country was my history. All my memories were of Bethesda, Deiniolen and Tregarth, when my parents brought me up from the south on visits that lasted months: now I remembered the Sunday teas, the day of rest from the quarry, with people sitting around in starched black, waiting for chapel. Welsh cakes were on my tongue; in my head was the thunder of the sea at Port Penrhyn where the great ships came in, and the sound of the quarry hooter echoing in the valleys. It was slate country, hard and daunting, yet I loved it, and the mountains rearing up about me brought again the old, unfathomable excitement.

‘How d’ye say that again?’ asked Ma Bron, staring back at the cottages.

‘Caer-ber-llan,’ I said.

Once, when young, my mother lived in Twelve Caerberllan.

‘Pity about your mam dyin’ so sudden,’ said Ma Bron at the moon. ‘She were a nice little thing. Had a hard time at the end, didn’t she?’

I stared at the road.

Bluenose took us up into Capel Bethesda, along the town’s night-deserted road; the taverns and cottages of the quarrymen squatted like bull-frogs in the moonlight, awaiting a spring. ‘Where does your grandpa work, you say?’

‘Black Hill Quarry,’ I replied.

‘A labouring fella, is he?’

It stirred me. I said, ‘He drives the engines Rough Pup and King of the Scarlets. He takes the trains out of Gilfach and along the lake to Bethel, and the sea.’

‘Is he an owner?’

‘Diawch, no!’ I warmed to the subject. ‘But he’s Number Two driver to Assheton-Smith, and …’

‘Who the hell’s Assheton-Smith?’ She made large eyes above her baby’s face.

‘And … and he says that if I settle with him, he’ll get me down to Port Dinorwic on the incline-loading, or even work me as a rybelwr.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Special trade – slate labourer – you’re a girl, you wouldn’t understand.’

‘Is there money in it?’

‘Aye, woman. And if I cart the rubbish clean I can split all sizes – for money on me own!’

She didn’t reply to this. I made a fist of my hand and struck my knee. ‘Aye, damn!’ I said fiercely.

Suddenly, the dawn was uncertain in a red fleece of a day, and amid moon-darkness the sun was driving the world before him, shepherding the night clouds like sheep over the rim of the mountains. I stood up, turning on the footboard, crying: ‘You see that big hole?’

Standing, too, Ma Bron nodded; the caverns of the biggest man-made hole in the world had made shape. I cried, as the cart slowed, ‘If you buried all the people in the world in that hole, and all the people dead already, and all the people going to die, you’d never fill it, Ma Bron, you hear me?’

‘They can hear you over in blutty Wrexham.’

‘That hole’s so big it would never fill with people, missus! You could just go on piling the bodies in, an’ you’d never get to the top – you realise?’

‘It’s an interesting thought.’

‘And this is the biggest slate town in the world! Welsh slate’s the best, you know.’

‘Well, I never did,’ said she.

Sitting down on the footboard I screwed my fingers, hating her.

But all would happen as I had planned it, I thought. Already I could feel the bite of the rope around my thigh and the rock face danced in wetness above a hundred foot drop. In the eye of my mind I saw the stone splitting its face to a gunpowder flash, and white smoke pouring from the riven mountain. I heard the shouts of men as the drills stuck fast in the greystone vein, which my mother had said was richer than gold: I was aboard the Cackler and the old George B again, rumbling and swaying along the line to Lake Padarn, as I had done with my grandfather in childhood, up from Tonypandy on a visit. Velinheli and Cloister, Bethesda and Llanberis – these were the magic names! I would work the two and four foot gauges to the giant L.N.W.R., for my grandpa had driven them all. And I could see him now in that coming dawn, a giant in strength and purpose, his big hands on the engine brass as we clattered down to Bethel for the port-incline, and the song of it danced in my brain.

We had stopped outside the Waterloo public now: the only one watching us was an urchin with his finger up his nose.

‘Where’s Pentir, then?’ asked Bron, easing herself down off the boards, and rubbing her rear. ‘Diawch, mun – eight hours up by there, it’s a wonder I ain’t split me difference.’

The urchin bawled, in Welsh, ‘Y ffordd orau i Bentir ydy drwy’r caeau!’ and Ma Bron said, staring at him:

‘Chinese, is he?’

I answered, ‘He says it’s over the fields to Pentir – I’ll take ye, shall I?’ and I picked up her bundle.

‘Oh, no you don’t,’ said she, ‘you put it down.’

The dawn sea-wind whispered and was cold on our faces.

‘Don’t trust you,’ said she, and pulled the shawl higher about her baby’s face. ‘Don’t trust anybody, do we Bibbs? – you bugger off, Toby Davies.’

The cart had gone. Uncertain, we stood looking at Bethesda, then she hoisted her bundle higher and strode off down the road to Bangor.

‘Might see you some time, yeh?’ I called after her.

‘Not if I see you first,’ cried Bron.

The cockerels were knocking their heads off by the time I reached Deiniolen, and there was a smell of bacon on the wind as I trudged up to Black Hill Quarry, where somebody told me Grandpa was working.

Here thick wedges of quarrymen were pouring out of the cottages, and I joined them: silently they marched in the thin sunlight like men raked from dreams and few gave me more than a glance. Behind and below us, as we marched upwards, the sun spread disclosing patterns of gold over the fields of the upland farmers.

All about me in that upward climb there grew a black desecration. The fields began to tremble to concussive shotfiring and quarry bugles sang. Rounding a bend in the road I came upon whining mill machinery, wagons and locomotives: trucks, harnessed in threes, were climbing and descending slate inclines. The men about me tramped with a quickened pace, as if the quarry working had injected them with a new fervour. Here, the mountain seemed to have exploded, and from the gaping mouths of caverns, relays of clanking wagons emerged. At the quarry gate a foreman said to me:

‘You after rubbishing, son?’ This in Welsh, and in Welsh I answered:

‘I seek Ezra Davies, sir.’

‘There’s half a hundred Ezra Davieses.’

‘Grandpa of Tabernacle Street – he’s expecting a grandson,’ said a man in passing.

North or south, the Welsh don’t miss a lot.

The foreman pointed. ‘Down the incline to the barracks.’ He asked, ‘You wanting work in slate?’

‘Aye, sir.’ I stood decent for him.

‘God alive, you’re madder than Grandpa.’

As I began the descent to the barracks I saw the Anglesey men coming out of them for the shift; these, like Grandpa, apparently, lived in the little cabins that dotted the mountainside: they greeted me as I approached them; tough men, cast in the same womb-mould, mainly clean in the mouth. One said, nodding at my bundle, ‘Just starting, lad?’

I looked him over for trouble but his eyes were kind.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ he asked.

‘Toby Davies.’

‘Where from?’ His ears, I noticed, were thin and bloodless; criss-crossed with tiny, broken blood-vessels; the hallmark of the quarryman, bought with cold.

‘Tonypandy – my dad was in coal.’

‘O, aye!’ He spat slate dust. ‘I was Rhondda once, God knows how I landed here – a woman’s eyes, perhaps.’ He grinned wide. ‘But I’m back there first opportunity, it’s best down south.’

I said, ‘D’ye know where I can find Ezra Davies’s cabin?’

He smiled at the sun. I said, ‘The driver of The King of the Scarlets – Grandpa Davies.’

‘We got a Grandpa Ez as an orderly in Caban Two, but he don’t drive.’

Just then I saw my grandfather open the door of this cabin and come out with a broom.

So much for dreams.

Through ten years I remembered him, seeing him then – right back to when we visited him from Tonypandy, down south. He was a fine, fierce old grandpa then, northern Welsh to the marrow, but he had a thick ear on him from mountain fighting I’d have sold my soul to possess, and he’d given me a course of boxing lessons, I recall. But that was years ago. Now the Clock of Time had got its hands on Grandpa; change, constant and enduring, was upon his face as he patted his chest for dust, leaned on the broom and peered at me in the sunlight.

‘Well, well,’ said he, ‘if it isn’t my little Toby!’

Taking off my hat I screwed it before him, and I saw one who had earlier towered above me; in the lined parchment of his face I glimpsed the jumping footplate as we went through Bethel with slate, and I heard again the clicking of the valves and the shee-shaa, shee-shaa of the Cackler’s pistons come alive in wounds of spurting steam. Grandpa said, as if reading me:

‘Don’t drive no more, Toby boy – you come for engines?’

‘It don’t matter, Taid, I come to be with you.’

The slate labour beat about us and there was nobody in the world for us then, save ghosts. But I still always remember that fine April morning when all Nature was painting up for a beautiful summer, and the face of my grandfather as he leaned on the broom, gasping, for slate-smoke had got him proper. Seeing him was like being with my mother again, for she was of his features.

On those visits years back we would start out together, my mam and me, for the wayside halts, to meet my grandpa bringing trains down to the port. Hand in hand with her, stretching my legs to match the stride of her laced-up boots, we went together, and her head was high, her skirt billowing, bonnet-streamers flying.

‘How did she go, Toby? I never got word of it,’ Grandpa asked.

‘The heart took her.’

‘Wrexham workhouse, was it?’

‘Aye, I stayed on working there, to see her through.’

‘Dear me,’ he said at his fingers.

Men were coming out of the caban and they shouldered Grandpa aside; it filled me with a sudden anger, and I pushed one back.

‘Hey – easy!’ I said.

The men glared, their humour changed. Behind my grandfather’s thin shoulders I saw the cabin bright and clean.

He said, wearily, ‘Now you come for a job?’

I took him inside and sat him on his bed. Some off-shift quarrymen called in earthy banter.

He said to me, staring up. ‘It’s … it’s me chest, ye see – I got dust.’

I looked around the cabin that soon would be my home; for a time anyway, I thought, until I could get money enough to take Grandpa south and get into coal, my father’s trade. Coal was all right, the Coal Owners said – being vegetation, it did no damage to the lungs; in fact, to breathe a bit of coal-dust was healthy for a man, they reckoned … though later I learned the truth of this. But this slate dust, the smoke of granite, had changed my grandfather into a walking wheeze; since he had been on engines when I left him, I wondered how it had happened.

‘When they took me off the locos, they had me in the mill,’ he explained.

I sat beside him on the bed, wondering if slate-masters found it difficult to breathe.

‘We got to get south, Grandpa!’

‘First you get the fare,’ answered a man nearby, and wandered towards me; his Welsh was pure and he had a set of bull shoulders on him.

‘Tom Inspector,’ said Grandpa. ‘This is Tobias, me grandson.’

‘You the foreman?’ I asked.

The men in the cabin laughed with boisterous humour. One cried, ‘That’s his ambition – he’s a rubbisher.’

‘Got the wrong politics, eh, Tom?’ said Grandpa.

The man said, ‘And religion denomination. What are you, boy?’

‘Congregational.’

‘You’ll change; the foreman’s a Calvinistic Methodist, but jobs come ten a penny, if you’ve got a pound.’

‘You got to bribe ’em,’ said Grandpa.

I thought, desperately, I’ve got to get south, south …

The men gathered about us. One nudged me, nodding at Grandpa. ‘His lungs are gone; it’s harsh up here for the old ’uns.’

I gripped the few pence in my pocket, and looked slowly around the rough cabin walls.

These cabins – built mainly for single men working away from home – were dotted all over the quarries of Caernarfonshire; they were halls of richness when it came to oratory, with a Lloyd George under every bed, said Grandpa.

The men in this one were mainly large: enjoying a surly strength, their speech was the high sing-song of the Lleyn peninsula; their wit sparkled under the low, slate roof: politics, unionism and theology flourished; the need for a Workers’ Combination against the twin masters, Lord Penrhyn and Assheton-Smith, dominated all discussion.

There was Dick Patagonia, who was always going to emigrate; Yorri Jones, who had bad feet. Sam Demolition was a shot-firer; Dico Bargoed, an old southern mountain-fighter come north to die, was the cook in this caban; my grandpa was its cleaner. But the man I remembered best of all arrived after the others, while I was settling me down in a bed beside Grandpa: the twenty men in the caban stared up in expectation as Ben O’Hara opened the door.

I think I knew, in the moment he set eyes on me, that his destiny was linked with mine.

‘Somebody signed on?’ He was tall, handsome, and with a brogue on him like the bogs of Connemara.

‘Grandpa’s kid,’ said Tom Inspector.

‘One thing’s sure, he’s got Grandpa’s chin.’ O’Hara beat his hat against his thigh for dust. ‘What’s ye name, wee fella?’

If I was wee it was only in the shoulders, for I nearly matched his height. Getting up, I faced him, and smelled the drink from yards.

He strolled closer with arrogant grace, shouting, ‘What ails ye, Grandpa? Must you feed him to the dust? Isn’t one enough in the family?’

‘I got no option,’ said Grandpa, moodily, ‘the lad insisted.’

In the middle of the room O’Hara pulled out a flask, swigging it deep. ‘And if he had any sense he’d up and go. Thought you was too old a cat to be messed about wi’ kittens.’

‘Mind your business, Ben, and I’ll mind mine.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Sixteen,’ I said.

‘And didn’t we say in the Combination that we’d keep down the rate of lads? The rubbishers are starving to death under Assheton already – what’s he going on?’

‘Port Dinorwic, if I can get him,’ said Grandpa, coughing.

‘You’ll do him a good turn there on his bollocks.’

‘I aren’t having him in the dust!’

‘Damned old fool – can’t you talk him into the farms?’

‘No,’ I said, getting up.

It turned him, flask in hand; his great, dark eyes switched over me.‘Arrah!’ he said, softly, ‘the mite speaks for itself.’

‘And Grandpa now,’ I replied.

He smiled. ‘That’s fair and decent. What’s your name?’

‘Tobias,’ and he retorted:

‘I’m talking to men, lad; when I talk to boys they get the back o’ me hand.’ He swung away from me, facing my grandfather. ‘They’re yellin’ for farm hands down in Peris, why cough him up on dust in this forsaken place?’

‘He won’t get dust at the port, that’s the idea,’ said Tom Inspector.

‘The foreman down there’s a bastard, an’ he’ll work his tabs off – now come on, Granfer, come on!’

Grandpa hunched his shoulders, saying at his hands, ‘He’s a Davies boy, and them’s coal or slate; I’m not havin’ him on the land.’ He raised his face defiantly. ‘You’re always on the talk about Combinations, aren’t you? Now you sign him on! When I come up here first I tasted the earth and the water, and it was good. I cleared the scrub up here in my time, when Penrhyn stole Llandegai; we dug and ploughed and sowed, and all we growed was loneliness.’

Ben O’Hara said, with a fine Irish lilt, ‘Are you speakin’ to me or to God, fella?’

A silence fell on the room; the men shifted with uneasy application, their hands untidy, stitching and lacing; mending boots and holes. Ben O’Hara dropped his coat behind him and stripped off his shirt: there was a rough-hewn strength about him that the ill-fitting quarryman’s clothes hadn’t concealed; black hair was on his chest and forearms as he wandered to the cook-stove where the old Rhondda mountain-fighter was bending, half asleep.

‘What’s eating, Dico, me son – lobscows?’

The old man didn’t reply, but rose, wandering away from the simmering pot with the catlike grace of the athlete in age; in his burned out brain, contused with blood, were the spattered memories of three hundred fights, they said. Ben O’Hara grinned after him, then spooned the broth to his lips and whistled at the steam.

‘Dico’ll have you, tasting the supper,’ said a man.

‘He couldn’t hit a hole in a wet echo.’

‘Go easy, Big Ben,’ said Tom Inspector, ‘this was his trade.’

And Grandpa roared, ‘Are you taking him or not, ye bloody Irish yob?’

Over his shoulder, O’Hara said, ‘He’s on the farms, me old son; I’ll not be recommending him, neither for the quarry nor the port.’ He flung down the spoon.

Grandpa said, holding his chest, ‘And this is why we drop our pennies to Parry’s blutty Combination!’

O’Hara replied, ‘Come off it, Grandpa. If you’d had Parry’s Combination thirty years back, ye wouldn’t be eatin’ dust today.’

I cried, ‘You can count me out of the Combination, whatever you call it, Mr. O’Hara – I’ll get a job on me own.’

‘It’s a free country, son, you can try, but you’d be happier on the land, d’ye see?’ Hands on hips, he surveyed me, grinning wide, the handsome bugger. ‘If ye insist, then, here’s the bribe – you can pay it back at a shilling a week.’ He offered me a sovereign.

‘I’ll do it on me own,’ but I took it later, to please Grandpa, who said with moody discontent, ‘One never knows where they are with you, Ben O’Hara. I wonder how Nanwen puts up with it.’

Vaguely, I wondered who Nanwen was.

My grandpa might not have been driving the trains any more, but he had a pull with the drivers, and next morning we went down to the loco sheds for a puffer that would get me to the port. The shunt moved on a string-chain and we lay together with our boots cocked up and slid down on a slate-haul into the station of the valley.

Lying there beside my old grandpa, with the cold kiss of slate under my head, I listened to the singing of larks above the grinding wheels, and through narrowed eyes watched gulls soaring in the enamelled blue of the sky like handfuls of feathers flung to the wind.

How wonderful, I thought, is the gift of sight; God must have pondered the treasure long before breathing eyes into the heads of people. The whole world was a song of sight on that bright summer morning: the sparkle of the diamond dew of the mountain, the creeping legions of sheep; the contrasting colours of lane, field and hedgerow glowing in the sun; the waving poplars, oaks and elms. Momentarily, I closed my eyes, and in the suffused lightness of blood and sun, the blindness that came in dreams shouted from redness. But, when I opened them again, the country smiled, bringing me to peace.

All about me on that downward slide was the song of summer; framed between my hobnails were the twin lakes of Padarn and Peris; rearing up to my left was the ‘Lady of Snowdon’. And in that swaying, bucking run on the wagon there was a sense of freedom greater than I had known: it spelt release from the bondage of Wrexham workhouse, it cleansed the loss of my mother. I felt a new, wild hope for the future, and this hope grew into a stuttering excitement when the slide ended in the valley and I helped Grandpa out. Slapping ourselves for dust we went together down the platform where a little engine was puffing and farting, impatient to be off to Port Dinorwic, and Grandpa shouted up to the driver:

‘You take my grandson to the Incline, Will’um?’

Beefy red was the driver. ‘This herring in boots? Diawch, man, it’ll be a disaster on his crutch. Lifting and stacking, is he?’

‘Ay,’ I said. ‘Are ye taking me, or not?’

‘If ye shove,’ said the driver, and I was up and behind him, with the fire-box open and the coal going in. He added:

‘Don’t make it the biggest thing in your life, lad – just steam her,’ and he dropped a handle and we were away, with his gold hunter watch out and two hoots on the whistle, and I never saw Grandpa go.

Out of the station we went, rattling and bonking in a hissing of steam and soot explosions, with twelve wagons behind us bucking to come off in the sun-struck, verdant country.

‘You got a good old grandpa, mind,’ yelled the driver.

To hell with Grandpa, it was the engine I was after.

On, on, whistling and hooting, stuttering along in a clanking thunder, with Lake Padarn flashing silver at us one side and the mountains lying on their shoulders winking at the sun: sheep fled in panic, cows scampered, for here comes that little black bugger again, good God – thumping over the level crossings, with the peasants standing obediently, faces lowered to The King of the Scarlets all black and gold and red, and I wouldn’t have changed places with the King of France. Before us stretched the rolling hills of Wales; behind us, curtseying, the parasite wagons carried the black gold of the earth, and all in a click-clack, woosha-woosha, thundering through Penllyn where the horse was killed, to Bethel, Pensarn and the sea. Open with the fire-box door again and heat and flame struck out in search of me as dust woofed up, and I slammed it shut with my foot.

Approaching Dinorwic, he slowed us and the brakes screamed in pain.

In a thunder of silence we stood while steam wisped up.

Harsh commands now at the top of the incline, the drop to the port.

‘Turn-table! Where the hell are ye?’

‘Come on – come on!’

Men running; shackles clanked; disengaged, the little engine swung.

Marvellous is the ingenuity of Man, using the pull of the earth to Man’s advantage. Fascinated, I watched. Four wagons on the parasite slid down the incline; full to the brim with slates for the world, they crept down the rails into the maws of Port Dinorwic. The beefy driver said:

‘Right you – off, me son. Off! This isn’t an annual outing.’

I walked down the track-incline into the port.

I’d have given my soul to have stayed on that engine.

Here, either side of the great sea-locks, was a vast storehouse of slate; enough to cover the thatched roofs of Europe. Along a network of narrow gauge railways half a dozen little engines were fussing and fuming and wagons clanking from one pile to another; down the tunnel incline, through which I had come, the wealth of Llanberis was pouring; the finished slate from the bowels of the mountain, undisturbed, until now, since the world was made; split, fashioned and squared by the craftsmen of ages.

The dock itself was a network of spars, sails and steaming funnels – the new era of steam, the great eighty and a hundred tonners: sloops and ketches, square-rigged schooners; little barges from the Thames estuary, Holland and Spain had thronged through the gates of Port Dinorwic; even bigger ships were standing off nearby Port Penrhyn, awaiting their turn for loading. Whistles were blowing, mule-whips cracking, commands bellowed by bully overseers; cranes were swinging in belching steam, ghosts of grey dust were labouring in hundreds, heaving the slate cargo aboard the decks in hundred pound stacks – the Mottles and Greens, the Wrinkles and Reds, they told me later – slates of different size and colour; the imperishable roofing that neither laminates nor cracks in Arctic snow nor Sahara sun.

I took a deep breath and strode into the yard and the first ominous thing I saw was the port foreman: very powerful on his knees, this one, according to Grandpa; doing the breast stroke along the back pews of Calfaria, with fornication punishable by stoning, and what the hell do you want?

‘Come for work, Foreman,’ I said.

‘South, are you?’

‘Me mam was Bethesda.’

‘Ye look a string-bean to me. Where do you lodge?’

‘Black Hill Quarry.’

‘Then why not vote for Assheton-Smith by there?’

‘My grandpa’s got dust,’ I said.

He saw the sense of it, which surprised me, for most Welsh foremen were only half human: dumpy and fat was this one, and a watch-chain across his belly like the chains round Pentonville. Through puffy cheeks he regarded me.

‘Name?’

‘Tobias Davies.’

‘Age?’

‘Sixteen.’

I dropped the sovereign Ben O’Hara had lent me, and he picked it up and bit it in his teeth. ‘Where you from, you say?’

‘Wrexham workhouse.’

‘When did ye get in?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘What you wanting?’

‘Loading and stacking, Foreman – give us a start?’

‘Shilling in the pound for me – first twelve weeks?’

I sighed. ‘Aye, God willing.’

He watched me, his little eyes switching. ‘Are you a religious boy?’

I shone with anticipation. ‘Oh, yes!’

‘Denomination?’